ABSTRACT
Contemporary interest in discourse analysis can be traced to the work of Bartlett (1932), who noted that structurally familiar stories were better remembered than structurally unfamiliar ones, and Propp (1968), who suggested that the entire corpus of Russian folk tales was based on a limited number of themes or “functions.” In recent years, the ideas proposed by Bartlett and Propp have been elaborated and refined by cognitive scientists with an interest in discourse analysis. The models they have proposed may be divided into three broad categories: (a) those in which a knowledge of story syntax is hypothesized to guide and structure the narrative process (Mandler, 1982; Rumelhart, 1975; Stein & Glenn, 1979), (b) those in which a knowledge of the universal properties of human action is hypothesized to play this underlying function (Bower, Black, & Turner, 1979; Schank & Ableson, 1977; Wilensky, 1983), and (c) those more general models in which both syntactic and semantic elements have been integrated (de Beaugrande, 1982; Bereiter, 1983; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
